Beyond the boundaries of established science an avalanche of exotic ideas compete for our attention. Experts tell us that these ideas should not be permitted to take up the time of working scientists, and for the most part they are surely correct. But what about the gems in the rubble pile? By what ground-rules might we bring extraordinary new possibilities to light?

Postby Cargo » Fri Feb 09, 2018 10:10 pm"The dust particles are seen because the camera auto-white-balance adjust for the lighting condition as the Earth moves out of the frame."

Haven't seen any comments on the white stuff or where it is coming from. The auto gain on the camera would not likely be affected by those small specs, but in the last image of the car and Earth it can be seen that the Earth is badly overexposed, I can not adjust the image with software to get any detail, and I suspect the camera did crank up the gain in order to make the car more visible. If Earth had been properly exposed I believe the car would have been very dark, even though the Sun should be just as bright out there according to the standard model.I noticed when watching the live feed that the altitude of the payload reached 167 km before the telemetry info was no longer displayed. The ascent rate had been slowing considerably for some time, and was stuck at 166 km for quite a while before finally going to 167. My orbital mechanics skills are almost non existent, but surely it should have been going higher than that to get into an asteroid belt crossing orbit?

So funny, just checked in to post it myself...Was there some listed information that made you think it was a long term exposure?

It looks like it's snowing on the surface of Comet 67P, but there's more to a gorgeous new space GIF than meets the eye...Mark McCaughrean, the ESA's senior adviser for science and exploration, shared @landru79's GIF and offered up some explanations of what we're seeing. What looks like snow flying around is actually a combination of stars in the distance and dust blowing around the comet's surface...McCaughrean also identified the stars in the background as coming from the constellation Canis Major.

I don't have the links anymore, but I remember that they had to do massively long exposures because it is like taking pictures of charcoal briquettes in the dark. HA!

They have to play with the contrast, etc..., to the point that the picture is massaged to the max. When they first showed the landing, with all the press corps there, I don't think the reporters ever understood how dark the pictures actually were. For us to have pictures at all is amazing.

Plus the photos they used to make the video were taken 13 km from the comet, so seeing dust out that far is what is so scary to me.

The wide-angle camera is designed mostly for studying gas emission. There are medium-band red and green filters (12 and 21, respectively), but they are not often used, and there is no blue filter. The combination of narrowband filters that is closest to the RGB combinations in the narrow-angle camera is OI/NH2/CN (17/15/14), but proceed with caution.

Proceed with caution. Indeed, as what are being detected are lines not just of emissions but also absorptions.

The last instrument I looked at before deciding to give up on proving that our eyes would see none of what most of the instruments out there are detecting, was the Mercury Messenger MDIS. As it was going to take for ever to try and figure out photometric values from the information NASA et al provide, or not, on the internet, I decided I'd have a look at the instruments examining Mercury were up to. Being so close to the Sun it should be reflecting 1KW/M2 or so of sunlight back towards the camera, enough to fry the super-sensitive sensors used to detect distant starlight, I'd have thought.

The NAC detects only near-IR, we would not see it. The WAC detects from near-UV to IR, with 11 filters. What I did not know until looking at the info is that the filters are chosen to detect absorption lines, not emission lines. I don't think our eyes detect absorption lines.The term spectral reflectance is used with the imaging of both OSIRIS and MDIS, but this is using the term loosely, and implies that we are seeing reflected white light from the Sun, but the narrow-band filters were chosen to see absorption lines of Fe2+ in glass and silicates. So the colours in images like this are not reflected sunlight. There is no white light from the Sun.

"White light is light such as sunlight that contains all the colors of the visible spectrum in roughly equal amounts."

Truth is that Mercury is about as black as 67P, which should then raise the question of how we manage to see Mercury by eye from Earth when it would not be visible by eye if you were riding along with Messenger. A camera like the Mars webcam would see nothing of Mercury, which is why they do not send ordinary cameras to planets or moons with little or no atmosphere. Like the Moon, Mercury does emit gamma, x-ray, UV wavelengths, so there is your clue. Our atmosphere creates the visible light.

I am not presently much interested in this pursuit though, as I have been looking at the Sun from a different perspective, and it is not boring at all. I have been looking into the ancient megalithic structures around the world and am just amazed that the mainstream can ignore not just these structures but the implications inherent in them. Reverence for the Sun was, and still is, practised by many, including the Catholic church.http://www.end-times-prophecy.org/roman ... arist.htmlThe cross on the Eucharist is actually a t, for Tammuz.We think that this Sun worship was due to the ignorance and superstition of the early practitioners, but when I see the amazing capabilities of the ancients, the science, engineering, architecture, language, poetry, philosophy etc, then I think we must consider that what was being told by them about the nature of the Sun must be taken seriously. There is far more to the Sun that just its physical properties, and by way of principles not yet understood, I believe that we are all connected to the Sun in such a way that, with proper considerations, we would have access to the knowledge that allowed the ancients to perform the feats they did, and perhaps have access to the sum total of all the information in the Universe.

End sermon...

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

by Rafi Letzter, Staff Writer | April 24, 2018 11:41am ETThe Truth Behind This Amazing Video from the Surface of a CometThis clip is made up of 25 minutes worth of images from ESA's Philae lander, and was processed by Twitter user landru79. Original ImageCredit: ESA/landru79Look at this amazing GIF. That snowy-looking scene wasn't captured on Mount Everest, or in some canyon in Antarctica. That's the view from a lander on the surface of a comet.

Remember Rosetta? That comet-chasing European Space Agency (ESA) probe that deployed (and accidentally bounced) its lander Philae on the surface of Comet 67P? This GIF is made up of images Rosetta beamed back to Earth, which have been freely available online for a while. But it took Twitter user landru79 processing and assembling them into this short, looped clip to reveal the drama they contained.

As several astronomers and casual observers pointed out in the replies to landru79's original tweet, the "snowstorm" depicted almost certainly isn't a true snowfall of the sort experienced on Earth and other planets. Instead, there are likely two or three different phenomena creating the snowy effect.

Up close to the camera, dust particles backlit by the sun are likely moving around, mimicking the look of snow on Earth. Cosmic rays may also be creating snow-like artifacts on the images. And those dots in the background, that appear to be falling straight down and disappearing behind the cliff? Those appear to be stars, which look like they're falling because the comet is rotating as it orbits the sun every 6.5 years.

The clip has also been sped up a great deal, enhancing the drama.

According to the creator, the first frame of the GIF is an image shot June 1, 2016, at 3.981 seconds past 5 p.m. UTC (1 p.m. Eastern). The last frame is an image shot at 17.017 seconds past 5:25 p.m. (1:25 p.m. Eastern) on the same day. That means that a bit more than 25 minutes worth of action is compressed into this short clip, so everything appears to be moving much faster than it did in reality.

But none of that is to detract from what landru79 pulled off here, which captures something close to the drama of standing on the surface of a far-away comet (though we've never tried that).

Landru79 said that in their next project they will use the color information Rosetta beamed home to make a full-color version of the GIF. Live Science can't wait to see it.

Update, 12:23 p.m. Eastern:

Landru79 posted another GIF on Twitter, which freezes the starfield in the clip in place, making it clearer that the comet is moving but the stars are mostly staying still.

SODISM. Sounds rude, but this is an instrument aboard the French PICARD microsat that has studied the Sun from space. But the Sun is not visible from space I have been saying. So if this device was studying the Sun, 24/7/365, how can that be? PICARD is in a near polar orbit, so to view the Sun it must be looking sideways with respect to the N/S Earth axis. The heat radiator panels are on top of SODISM, facing directly away from Earth into the cold of deep space.So, again, this instrument is looking through a long column of Earths upper atmosphere, and that is how it can see the Sun. Total fraud.

And with OSIRIS and the star images, even though they were long exposure and mostly in UV or IR, I believe the dusty and ionised atmosphere of 67P through which the NAC was seeing the stars boosted the visibility. The best image of the stars (IMO) from the page Frank linked to was 150 seconds with the neutral_green filters. Green is often used in conjunction with lumogen optical coatings, which will convert UV to visible light at 525 nm, well within the bandwidth of the OSIRIS NAC green filter. The Neutral Density (neutral) filter will be used as the lumogen fluoresces sufficiently that they use it, I think, so as not to saturate the sensor.

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

The OSIRIS-REx StowCam uses a Bayer Filter to give a true coluor image of the heat shield, and the lighting source is supposedly a very bright Sun. Looking at the images available, I noticed that, as with the Apollo cislunar space EVA images, the light source does not move. In the linked images there is a shadow of a bolt protruding a little through a fastener on the shield at lower left, and some bright reflection highlights best seen on the hardware visible in this image. This can not be the Sun, it is artificial lighting, as was the light source for the Apollo EVAs.

First light for OSIRIS-REx StowCam

No stars are visible due to the bright illumination provided by the sun.

'To better understand the outgassing effects on the spacecraft’s trajectory – and to bake out much of the remaining water before the spacecraft arrives at Bennu – the OSIRIS-REx mission team designed an outgassing program for execution starting earlier this fall. The choice of timing took into account both the spacecraft’s proximity to the Sun (less than 1 AU) and the fact that there were no science activities planned during this period. The outgassing program is being run concurrently with outbound cruise operations and does not affect the timing of the spacecraft’s arrival at Bennu'.

'Starting in mid-October, the spacecraft has been placed into various attitudes to expose different parts of the SRC to direct sunlight and initiate outgassing. Priority is given to the portions of the SRC that will face the Sun during asteroid proximity operations. The mission team has been able to detect and measure the rate of outgassing at each attitude and has determined that water is being removed as expected. The goal is to reduce the outgassing to the point where the spacecraft can fly the planned baseline trajectories around Bennu without modifications, and preliminary indications show that the program is progressing toward this goal. The program is scheduled to run through early January 2018'.

Here we(they) go again with their uttering's of imagination.

These two paragraphs are going against everything that is spoken of in this review!

This is downright scientific mumbo jumbo if I've ever heard (just more of it) from all these NASA company people. Water outgassing my eye, there is not any heat in space.

No, to be fair, there will be heat in space, but not as thermal IR from the Sun. The surfaces of the craft exposed to the Suns shorter wavelength ionising radiation will cause the surface to heat up due to electron orbital shift heating. This same process is what causes the high temperatures recorded on the surface of Mercury and the Moon. There is no white light from the Sun to provide illumination for the Bayer filtered camera to see by, so they need artificial light. The bake out is a pretty standard procedure.

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

A lunar optical imaging detector developed by Saudi Arabia is installed on a micro satellite launched together with Queqiao.

There is no info on the micro-sats optical imaging detector, so I am wondering if it is a photographic or spectrographic instrument? If the far side of the Moon is as dim as I belive it is, then photography using a regular camera will give very poor results. The instrument I would like to see used on a probe facing the far side is a light meter. It is impossible to try and imagine the lighting conditions of a subject if the device is spectrographic. A digital camera on full auto, if the EXIF data was available would also provide the info I would like to see in order to determine just how bright the illuminated far side would seem to our eyes.

In order to change an existing paradigm you do not struggle to try and change the problematic model. You create a new model and make the old one obsolete. -Buckminster Fuller

Speaking of the color green. I was reading about the color spectrum that the eyes can comprehend with the brain that it turns out that the colors green are the easiestcolors that the brain can distinguish or recognize from all the other colors. Maybe far fetched, but could this be why they use green filters.